Well... Going by how the Sky Digital boxes work here, anything designed by NDS will be locked down tight. Sky+ PVRs won't let you extract video and as pointed out, the stream is stored encrypted and only decrypted when you watch it. Sky/NDS won't release a CAM (Conditional Access Module) which supports the Videoguard encryption system so you're stuck with the Digiboxes they sell. You can't for example record directly to a PC using a DVB card. I'm assuming this is because they're worried it's a possible avenue for attack and copying.

Contraversally, the Sky+ boxes have the ability to disable fast forwarding during certain segments of a stream. People are worried that one day they'll wake up and find out that you can't fast forward through the adverts anymore. Alledgely they said they won't turn on this feature.

If you're happy to be the generic consumer and do exactly what they tell you to then it'll be fine. If you want to do anything different then expect serious obstacles.